The success of your IT infrastructure depends upon your operating system selection and has long-term consequences.

You must factor both technical and business features and determine which ones offer your business increased performance, availability and flexibility for both current and future business requirements.

There are many excellent operating systems to chose from including (but not limited to):

Linux (Fedora/RedHat/CentOS/Ubuntu/Debian)

IBM

Unix

HP

Novell

Microsoft Windows Server

SAP

Apple Mac OSX

Oracle/Sun Solaris

Business requirements for an IT infrastructure are all about the applications. Businesses depend on their applications for themselves and their customers. The applications’ performance and availability, in turn, depend on the platform on which they are deployed. Other business requirements, such as performance (often defined as response time, reliability, and stability), availability, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership (TCO) are also of high priority in decision-making.

More abstract requirements, like openness, reputation of the vendor, and the probability of the vendor ending product support, are often not normally specified, but play an important role in making long-term platform decisions.Key factors that influence operating system choice

Availability and scalability

Application migration considerations

Performance tools

The enterprise business requirements determine the operational requirements for the IT infrastructure, which, in turn, defines the requirements regarding reliability, availability, and supportability. Many of these operational requirements translate into technical feature requirements of available products and drive the decision of which combination of products provides the best fit for the needs of present and the foreseeable future.

Typically, the solution that fulfills these business requirements consists of multiple components: